Rachel Jimenez, founder and CEO of Prosperous Media Group.

Member Spotlight: Rachel Jimenez

Founder and CEO, Prosperous Media Group

Company Website: MoneyHackingMama.com

Rachel Jimenez is the founder and CEO of Prosperous Media Group, which sells digital products, including templates, for business owners. She is also working on a new course to help business owners, and people in general, optimize their lives. We asked her about her business and her experience in the Founders First accelerator program.

What was the inspiration for your business?  

I always wanted to help fellow small business owners. I have an MBA in entrepreneurship. I also studied positive organizational psychology. So throughout my career, I’ve always learned about tools to help people and business owners live better lives and just be more efficient. And so I wanted to share my skills and the resources that I had come up with. 

Additionally, there was a slightly selfish reason I started this business. All of my products are digital products. When I started this business, I was working full time and doing it as a side hustle. So creating digital products allowed me the ability to create my business while working full time and having two kids because I didn’t have to do things like fulfill products. Everything was automatically sent to people. So I was able to leverage technology to just save a lot of my time and be more efficient.

How do you feel the Founders First accelerator program impacted your business?

I think the biggest thing that helped me was just building my confidence. Going through the program with other entrepreneurs helped me realize that my skills and knowledge were valuable and that people needed what I had to offer. And even just being part of a cohort and meeting other entrepreneurs, that helped me understand the challenges that fellow business people like me were dealing with everyday.

I know your business has grown a lot since completing the program. 

Yeah, absolutely.

Did you have to pivot during COVID or was it pretty seamless given you have a digital business?

Yeah, I went through a lot of changes, and COVID actually in a way was a blessing to my business. I was working full time when COVID happened and I was actually pregnant with my second child. I had my daughter in May of 2020, so she was an early COVID baby. I was working from home, and when my daughter was born, I kept her home for a lot longer as well.

 But the biggest thing with COVID is that I realized that I wanted to be able to stay home. I really enjoyed working from home. And so I think in a way it gave me the motivation to push harder on my business. I quit my job about a year ago to run my business full time because it was able to replace my income.

But before then I was always just doing side hustles and dabbling. And then COVID really helped me kind of figure out what I wanted and I realized the working environment that I wanted. And even just having my daughter during that time made me realize I needed the flexibility that having your own business came with. And so there were a lot of aha’s that came through that time that really pushed me forward to the point that I’m at today.

Congratulations—on both the business growth and your daughter!… What attracted you to the Founders Accelerator program? How did you hear about it or what made you want to give us a try? 

In my program, we did some training modules and then you pitched your business at the end. I liked the training, but honestly I was interested in the money. If I could get this amazing training and be more successful, that would be great. But the icing on the cake was that there was a competition. I’m a competitive person, so I always like doing things like that, but there was a cash prize. You could use it as seed funding for your business. That really got me excited. And I ended up winning first place in my cohort and so that was a lot of fun and I was able to put that towards my business.

What advice would you have for the next up and coming entrepreneur out there?  

What I had to deal with a lot was the fear of failure. And so I would say if people are afraid of failing, just try to reframe how you think about failure. So, for example, I used to worry about it, but now I understand that failure is just an opportunity to learn and so if I’m failing, I’m actually just learning in a way that doesn’t work. 

And I like to think of it as data. So the more I fail, the more data that I’m starting to accumulate, the more lessons that I’m learning, and eventually all those are going to help me be more successful in the future. And my biggest advice is just rather than resisting failure, try to be grateful for it and think about the lessons that it brings as opposed to fighting it.

I think for a lot of people failure can hurt sometimes and be painful and emotional. And so, like feel the pain, feel the emotions, cry if you need to, but then give yourself a moment and try to ask better questions. And rather than resisting it, sometimes people just try to ignore it and forget about it, but really try to when you’re in a better place, maybe you’ve meditated a little bit or, you know, hung out with some friends, had some good positive emotions, but then try to reflect and ask yourself like, OK, I’ve dealt with that. That was painful. I don’t want to do this again. What can I learn from this so that I can avoid it in the future and that I can grow and be more successful in the future? And then I think you can actually gain a lot from failure and turn it into what launches you to be more successful in the future.

Interested in an accelerator program at Founders First?  Check them out!